EZTrip.com International Destination Guide and Hotel Listings

DAUPHIN was founded as a fur-trading post by the French in 1739 and is now a pleasant town that straggles across the flat prairie landscape just to the east of the Vermilion River. Its long Main Street features some good examples of early twentieth-century Canadian architecture, but there's only one real attraction, the Fort Dauphin Museum (May, June & Sept Mon-Fri 9am-5pm; July & Aug daily 9am-5pm; Oct-April by appointment tel 638-6630; $3). This tidy wooden replica of a North West Company trading outpost, located by the river at the end of 4th Avenue SW, fifteen-minutes' walk from Main Street, holds the stockade where there are reconstructions of several sorts of pioneer building, including a trapper's cabin. If you have time to kill, there's a huge, chateau-like CNR railway station on 1st Avenue NW and a modest arts centre and gallery at 104 1st Ave NW (Mon-Fri noon-5pm; free) in a striking Romanesque Revival building. At the corner of 1st Street SW and 11th Avenue SW is the Ukrainian Church of the Resurrection , with its distinctive clustered domes (by appointment only tel 638-4659, 638-5511 or 638-4618).

The fertile river valley that runs west of Dauphin towards Roblin was a centre of Ukrainian settlement between 1896 and 1925, and its village skylines are still dominated by the onion-domed spires of their Orthodox and Catholic churches. There's a modest collection of Ukrainian pioneer artefacts and traditional handicrafts in Dauphin at the Selo Ukraina Office , 119 Main St S (Tues-Sat 10am-5pm), but their main task is to organize the National Ukrainian Festival , which takes place on the first weekend of August at a purpose-built complex 12km south of Dauphin, just off Hwy 10 on the edge of Riding Mountain Park. The complex has a tiny heritage village dedicated to the early Ukrainian settlers (by appointment only tel 638-9401; free) and a splendid amphitheatre built into a hillside, ideal for the festival's music and dance performances.

Dauphin's bus station is at 4th Avenue NE and Main Street, a couple of minutes' walk from the town centre. The Chamber of Commerce , 21 3rd Ave NE (Mon-Fri 8.30am-4.30pm; tel 638-4838), provides tourist information. There's also a tourist bureau (mid-May to Aug Mon-Thurs 10am-6pm, Fri-Sun 9am-7pm; tel 638-5295), 2km away on the southern edge of town on Hwy 10, beside the airport.

For accommodation , the Boulevard Motor Hotel , 28 Memorial Blvd (tel 638-4410, fax 638-7642; $40-60/$60-80), the Dauphin Inn Motel , 35 Memorial Blvd (tel 638-4430, fax 638-7466; up to $40/$40-60) and the Dauphin Community Inn , 104 Main St N (tel 638-4311, fax 638-6469; up to $40/$40-60), are all (fairly seedy) downtown hotels ; you may opt instead for either the Canway Inn Motel and Suites (tel 638-5102 or 1-888/325-3335, fax 638-7475; $40-125), roughly 4km south of town near the junction of hwys 5 and 10, with a pool, a sauna and more appealing rooms - four of them have jacuzzis en suite, or the Touch of Africa Bed & Breakfast (tel 638-0085 or 638-7936, fax 638-8174; $40-60), on Hwy 10, south of Dauphin opposite the tourist information centre, which keeps ostrichs on its grounds. The Vermilion Trailer Park & Campground (tel 638-3740 or 622-3109, fax 622-3199; $12-16; May-Oct) is ten-minutes' walk north of Main Street at 21 2nd Ave NW. You can eat at Irving's Steak House & Lounge , 26 1st Ave NW, which has a real honky-tonk feel, or Zamrykut's Ukrainian Family Restaurant , 119 Main St N, a plain establishment that serves delicious home-made food, from borscht through to pierogies and kielbossa (sausage).

If you want to absorb still more Ukrainian ambience, visit the Wasyl Negrych Pioneer Farmstead , near the village of Gilbert Plains, 30km west of Dauphin. Here you'll find Canada's best-preserved and most complete Ukrainian homestead (June-Aug daily 1-5pm; rest of year by appointment; $2; tel 548-2477 or 548-2689). Wasyl and Anna Negrych arrived here in 1897 with their seven children from the Carpathian Mountains. Over the next few years they built the farmstead, which now has ten buildings - an 1899 home that replaced their first log house after it burnt down, three granaries, barns, a chicken coop, pigsty, garages and a bunkhouse with a fully preserved, working peech - the log and clay cookstove that was once the heart of every Ukrainian household. Amazingly, two of Wasyl and Anna's children ran the farmstead according to traditional practises until their deaths in the 1980s, never introducing electricity, sewers or telephone lines. The farmstead is now run by Parks Canada.